On the Self-Image of Chemists, 1950-2000

Abstract: The field of chemistry is
highly diverse. Yet, the aggregate picture of
chemists, according to this study, shows them to constitute a highly
homogeneous and even gregarious group, in terms of their self-image.
They see themselves as creative, as benefactors of humankind, and as
craftsmen upholding a tradition of intelligent hands and preserving,
even in the time of Big Science, a relatively low-tech profile. The
stereotypical public image as the sorcerer’s apprentices who befoul the
environment and who manufacture chemical weapons is way off target.
Chemists find it a caricature, it only reinforces the good conscience
within the chemical community. Other conservative forces are the common
language of structural formulas, a widespread phobia about mathematics,
and the very length of the apprenticeship to be served. Conversely,
between the mid-twentieth century and the advent of the twenty-first
century, chemists displayed an impressive adaptability in the face of
swift changes, regarding the tools of the trade – which the NMR
Revolution had contributed to upgrade –, the funding of their activity
at a much higher level, the oil crises, and the Biological Turn that
affected them during that period.

1. Introduction

Why should one attempt to characterize the
self-image of a group of scientists, during a relatively recent period?
And how to go about it? A tough assignment.

The answer to the former surely has to
involve the
relationship between the group’s production of new knowledge (in the
form of publications, patents, and textbooks for students) and the
prevailing culture: I cannot do better to define this otherwise vague
and catch-all entity than to refer to anthropological practice. I adopt
a by now classic characterization:

(The ethnographer figures out what the devil
natives
are up to) by searching out and analysing the symbolic forms – words,
images, institutions, behaviors – in terms of which, in each place,
people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one
another. [Geertz 1983]

As to the second question, given the
difficulty of
the task, my methodology will be eclectic. My first tool for gaining a
glimpse at the self-image of chemists takes advantage of the strong
iconic dimension of chemical language. Modes of representation may
somehow provide insight into their self-representations too. My second
tool is to focus on landmark achievements, those which the chemical
community regards as highly significant, as another step towards this
elusive goal, the definition of a collective self-image. The third,
obviously related tool is the consideration of eminent chemists. These
women and men, selected for admiration by their peers, stand for
something. A fourth tool is topographic: what is, at a given time, the
territory of the chemist? What does it include? Even more important,
what does it exclude? Blind spots, delayed recognition of achievements
can thus be highly significant. The fifth and last tool, all too
obvious, is a look at the vogues and fads: when a large number of
chemists rush towards the same goals, this involves individual
self-interest, which in turn reflects the image individuals hold of
themselves, an image both furthered and reinforced by the group.

I shall resort to periodization, to
subdivisions into decades.[1]
It has the advantage of simplicity, and the further merit of being
neither too coarse nor too fine-grained.

The 1950s saw the birth of the research
university
in the USA, together with that country seizing the lead in world
chemistry, both academic and industrial. This was the time of birth and
of explosive development of the nuclear magnetic resonance tool (Becker
1996). This was also the period when chemistry opened itself to
molecular biology. Also in the 50s, the chemical science restructured
itself, focusing on bonding and structure rather than on mere
description and cataloguing of chemicals and their characteristic
properties and reactions, as had prevailed since Lavoisier’s time.

The rethinking of the science went on during
the
1960s. This was a time for questioning previously held dogmas, such as
the rules governing valence, rudely pushed aside with the discovery of
noble gas compounds. But there were other upsets too, to such an extent
that one may wish to call the 60s the ‘Age of Hubris’:[2]
biological chimeras, spontaneous generation, high-temperature
superconductivity, and the dissolution of potassium permanganate in
benzene are some of the examples of such a mental attitude, calling for
disrespect for tradition. The 60s were noteworthy also for a major
breakthrough, the Woodward-Hoffmann rules governing electrocyclic
reactions (Woodward & Hoffmann 1971). And a social phenomenon,
actually the converse of a mass movement, should not be forgotten: when
in 1968 the university came under attack, worldwide, from students,
from the media and from the local communities, and even from its
faculties, chemists as a whole camped within their ivory tower,
oblivious of outside disruptions.[3]

The 1970s were the time of the first oil
crisis.
The petrochemical industry suffered from the consequences. As a
profession, chemists worked on developing alternative energy sources.
Photochemistry, with goals such as catalyzed photocleavage of water
providing fuel for a hydrogen economy, came to the fore. There were
many other projects, such as gasification of coal, or attempts at
direct functionalization of natural gas, which were pushed forward at
an impressive pace. The search for substitutes of oil went hand in hand
with a significant rise in environmental consciousness among chemists –
given especially some of the industrial spills during that period,
which the media exploited relentlessly against the chemical profession
as a whole, not only against the chemical industry.

During the 1980s, chemists as a group were
willing participants in a fuite en avant,
converts to a mystique of growth, even of exponential growth. This was
a time for proliferation of newly made compounds, as if their
preparation were synonymous with innovation. This was the time of the
rise of combinatorial chemistry (Breslow 1997, Borman 1998), whose
products in the tens and hundreds of thousands were screened for lead
molecules by laboratories in pharmacology and in materials science.
This was also the time of the preparation of organometallics in large
numbers, vastly encouraged by the thrust from multinuclear NMR.[4]

The 1990s saw the spawning of nanoscience and
nanotechnology, building on some major advances, such as the discovery
of carbon nanotubes, following up on the serendipitous finding of
buckminsterfullerenes (Baggott 1994). While chemists redirected
themselves into these novel areas, they also had to come to grips with
chemophobia on the part of the public.

2. Academic and industrial chemistry

Now that I have sketched in these few bold
strokes what may have characterized those five successive decades, what
exactly is the task at hand?

There is considerable evidence for the strong
group
identity of chemists. Chemistry has the distinguishing feature of being
both a science and an industry. It is important to understand their
solidarity. Even at the time of strong media presence by industrial
accidents (Seveso in 1976), episodes of criminal negligence (Love
Canal, pollution of the Rhine), or catastrophes (Bhopal), academic
chemists, even though they felt victimized by the finger-pointing of
public opinion, would not turn against their industrial colleagues.

Academic chemistry and industry share an
umbilical
cord. Universities train chemists for an industrial career. In return,
the chemical industry funds some academic training (fellowships) and
research (grants). Many professors of chemistry serve as occasional
industrial consultants, receiving a handsome fee for their expert
advice. Moreover, it is not infrequent for chemical careers to be
hybrids, with scientists moving from an academic institution to an
industrial environment, or vice versa.

Examples which come to mind are those of
Philip E.
Eaton, who owed his interest in cage molecules to industrial work on
chlorinated pesticides, which led him to the epochal synthesis of
cubane in 1964 (Traynham 1997); of Fred McLafferty and George Olah, who
both worked for a time in a laboratory of Dow Chemical; of Richard E.
Smalley, an industrial chemist before he enrolled as a graduate student
at Princeton (Smalley 1996); of Earl Muetterties, who left the
Experimental Station at DuPont in Wilmington for a professorship at the
University of California; of Howard E. Simmons who, when heading
central research also at DuPont, turned down the offer of a
professorship at Harvard (Bohning 1993, Roberts & Collette 1999);
and so on.

A strong group spirit extends across the
chemical
board, even at the cost of seemingly exonerating managers of industrial
plants from grievous oversights or mistakes – in spite of their
belonging to a social group distinct from that of laboratory chemists,
whether academic or industrial. Put in another way: do chemists suffer
from collective guilt? From none, is the answer.

However, granted that chemists share a strong
group
identity, what does it consist of, and how did it evolve during the
second half of the twentieth century? I shall now proceed to build
answers to those queries.

3. The 1950s: rise of the research university and chemistry

The 1950s saw the rise of the research
university. The U.S. was its breeding ground: Science, the Endless
Frontier,
the report to the President by Vannevar Bush (1945) had urged such
support by the federal government, to which chemist James B. Conant,
then president of Harvard University and a close friend of V. Bush, was
no stranger. The main feature was funding the advancement of science
with public money, on a much-expanded basis (Weaver 1961).[5]
Chemistry benefited from it, in like manner as the other hard sciences.

In disciplinary terms, physics was the leader
in
this novel way of conducting scientific research, which reflected the
predominant part physicists had played during World War II (Kevles
1987).[6]
Moreover, the close association of physicists with the military during
the war translated into mission-oriented research, a concept which
trickled down from physics to chemistry. As a rule, physicists were
funded more handsomely than chemists. The latter became envious and
compared themselves often to physicists (Lind 1952, Anon 1958).

After Sputnik, one saw a massive increase in
the
popularity of science (Weinberg 1955) and in the numbers of young
scientists. Research became paradigmatic and entered the undergraduate
curriculum, even in liberal arts colleges (Kraus 1950, College of
Wooster 1959). The way in which chemists did their work also changed.
Electronic instrumentation came into the laboratory. Benches which in
previous times, for centuries indeed, had been furnished almost
exclusively with glassware, started receiving spectrometers
(UV-visible, infrared) and chromatographs. Another influence from both
physics and the military was the standardization of parts, making for
easier replacement. To mention but two examples, Heathkit electronic
components started being assembled, by chemists (Roberts 1990) or
electronic technicians, in both academic and industrial departments;
likewise Bantamware provided chemists with easily assembled glassware,
for running reactions reliably on a much smaller scale than had been
the norm.

Thus, physics had a deep-seated influence on
chemistry. It triggered a mutation from a craft, with manual
skills learned during an apprenticeship, to a manifold of standardized procedures,
each of which made of steps, recorded in written instructions, which
could then be followed similar to a pilot using a flying manual and a
checklist. Chemistry, as a discipline, lost a measure of autonomy; it
became more of a physical science, owing many of its tools (‘physical
methods’) to physics too. Moreover, it became solidly fixed in the
classification of sciences in-between physics and biology.

The birth of molecular biology saw to such an
anchoring between physics and biology. The discovery of the DNA double
helix (Watson & Crick 1953) was a turning point in the affirmation
of chemistry and biology as sister sciences. Correspondingly, the
notion of the interdependency of disciplines came to the fore,
chemistry getting its tools from physics and biology, in turn, getting
hers from chemistry. The influence from biology was not restricted to
molecular biology. To give another instance, prebiotic chemistry came
of age in the 1950s with the discovery of interstellar molecules (Ewen
& Purcell 1951) and with the classic experiment in prebiotic
chemistry (Miller 1953, Asimov 1960).

A chemist, Linus Pauling, embodied such a
physics-chemistry-biology alloy. A crystallographer by training, he had
taught himself the new quantum physics at its inception in the early
1930s and imported it into chemistry. Later on, during the 30s and 40s,
he was one of the pioneers in molecular biology, elucidating key
features of protein structure (Nye 2001). Pauling was much admired, an
emblematic figure to chemists worldwide (Lipscomb 1993, Hager 1995,
Kauffman et al. 2001).

However, in spite of and perhaps also because
of
the tendency to the blurring of disciplinary lines between chemistry
and her sister sciences biology and physics, inner lines within
chemistry endured and may even have become stronger. F. H. Westheimer
tells a revealing anecdote in this respect:

it is hard to understand the tightly
compartmentalized minds of the chemists of that day. (An extreme
example of compartmentalization: at the chemistry library at Cambridge
University, an imaginary line divided the room into two parts, one for
physical chemists and one for organic. The library had two sets of the Journal
of the Chemical Society,
since an organic chemist was not supposed to cross that imaginary line
to use the volumes on the physical chemistry side of the library, and
vice versa.) [Westheimer 2003]

A traditional aspect of chemistry also became
stronger, its iconic language of formulas that the structural theory of
the 1860s had established and which G. N. Lewis had bolstered with the
notion of the electron pair in the 1910s. Pauling and his concept of
mesomery (valence-bond theory) were responsible for this ‘formulaic
turn’, which became a lingua franca among chemists. While
physicists may have been virtuosi in estimating orders of magnitude for
their data or in setting up differential equations, chemists could find
shelter in their different language and, instead of
back-of-the-envelope calculations, jot a few Lewis structures and make
qualitative or semi-quantitative predictions, based on mesomery (Nye
2001).

I have emphasized so far the bonds between
chemistry and physics and between chemistry and biology. An overarching
notion for chemistry was to be of service to society. During World War
II, the penicillin project, second in importance only to the Manhattan
Project, had involved synthetic organic chemists and microbiologists
(Harris 1999, Raber 2001, Shama & Reinarz 2002). The search for new
antibiotics was a major thrust of pharmaceutical R&D during the
1950s. This turned out to be an epochal period in the alliance of
pharmacology and synthetic organic chemistry, with the syntheses of
morphine (Gates & Tschudi 1952), cholesterol and cortisone
(Woodward et al 1951a/b), cantharidin (Stork et al
1953, Bohning & Fine 1991), strychnine (Woodward et al.
1954), penicillin (Sheehan & Henery-Logan 1957), colchicine
(Schreiber et al 1961), chlorophyll (Woodward et al.
1960); with the elucidation of the biosynthesis of steroids
(Eschenmoser et al.
1955); and with applications of profound social impact, such as the
discovery of neuroleptics by Henri Laborit, Jean Delay, and Pierre
Deniker in 1950 (Healy 2002), that of the first benzodiazepine
tranquilizers librium and valium by Leo Sternbach and Lowell Randall in
1957 (Bello 1957, Baenninger et al. 2004) and the devising of
oral contraceptives by Carl Djerassi and Gregory Pincus in 1955 (Asbell
1995, Djerassi 1970, 2001). Chemists could see and indeed saw
themselves as agents of social change, even more so as they provided
society with entire crops of new materials, often made of polymers
(textile fibers, plastics).[7]
This was also the time for the rise of great industrial laboratories,
such as at DuPont (Roussel 1959a/b, Hounshell & Smith 1988), IBM,
Bell Telephone, or Xerox from the success of the newly devised (1950)
xerography, which all thrived from applying discoveries in pure science
(Stokes 1997, National Research Council 1998).[8]

To sum-up this section: chemists may have
cultivated an individual self-image of entrepreneur and a collective
self-image of social benefactors. This ploy preserved the age-long,
traditional image of craftsmen while adapting it to the flow of easy
money. Note, in passing, that entrepreneurship was not a new notion for
chemists. There had been quite a few examples in the past, such as
Perkin’s, Baekeland’s, or Mond’s. Furthermore, Justus von Liebig’s
laboratory at Giessen had pioneered a two-tiered organization of
chemical laboratories, egalitarian among group leaders and feudal
within each research group.

The 1950s, if dominated by university
expansion and
the attendant demographic increase among chemists, also portended
things to come. I shall only mention here a few: the interdiction of
fishing in Minimata Bay, which the poisoning by methyl mercury had
brought to a stop; the first rumblings of opposition to the widespread
use of pesticides (Anon. 1959); the devising of a ground-breaking
solid-state peptide synthesis (Merrifield 1963); and the discovery of
the NMR chemical shift (Dickinson 1950, Proctor & Yu 1950), which
went a long way towards explaining the major influence of NMR on
chemistry that we shall consider now.

4. The 1960s: the NMR revolution

The impact of NMR (nuclear magnetic
resonance) was three-fold, intellectual, social, and psychological. As
NMR superseded both earlier spectroscopic tools (such as IR and
UV-visible) and contemporary ones (MS), it enforced among chemists a
new kind of visual literacy. Chemists learned the skill of reading a
spectrum, translating its features into words belonging to the language
of chemistry, words such as ‘carbonyl’, ‘phenyl’, or ‘methyl’. Earlier
on, structural analysis had been a field in itself. Henceforth, the NMR
tool gave every chemist such expertise (Becker 1993).

The impact of NMR was revolutionary
(Zandvoort
1985, Anet 1996, Diehl 1996, Feeney 1996) also in bringing a host of
new questions to the fore. These concerned, to mention only a few,
nonequivalent groups of atoms and distinctions among stereoisomers,
fluxionality, nonbonded atomic contacts. NMR gave a boost to the study
of stereochemical relationships in molecules, which the contemporary
conformational analysis had brought to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s
(Barton 1972, Eliel 1990).

The A-60 was the instrument of change. Built
in
Palo Alto, California, by Varian Associates, it was a hands-on, routine
instrument that graduate students in chemistry could operate.
Precalibrated charts, together with an internal lock on a water sample
tube, allowed for a single sweep to record a spectrum (Anon. 1961). The
A-60 brought NMR to the masses. Chemists took to it like fish to water
(Jackman 1996).

The NMR tube replaced the test tube. This
assertion echoes that by Victor Hugo when he claimed so perceptively,
in Notre Dame de Paris,
in the superb ‘ceci tuera cela’ digression, that when Gutenberg
invented movable types, the book killed the cathedral and its imagery,
which had been so important earlier in educating Christians.

For centuries, chemists were associated with
test
tubes, not only in the popular imagination. The test tube was used
primarily for qualitative analysis. Adding a few drops of a reagent
would trigger a response, maybe a color change, a turbidity, or a
precipitation, from which the chemist would infer the likely presence
of a component in the liquid mixture, be it a ketone or sulfate anions.

With the NMR tube, chemists were offered a
lighter
and subtler perturbation. The reagent now consisted only of
radiofrequencies (RF). Their resonant absorption by the sample in the
NMR tube yielded a comprehensive inventory of the groups of atoms
present. The NMR tube did not alone replace the test tube, because it
came at the heels of other spectroscopic cells, such as for electronic
absorption (UV-visible) or in vibrational (IR and Raman) spectroscopy.

Moreover, NMR was revolutionary in provoking
a Gestalt
switch (to borrow Kuhn’s phraseology) in the chemists’ perceptions.
Earlier, molecules were identified by their functional groups,
carbonyls, hydroxyls, and the like, which were like beacons (as
reflected in chemical nomenclature, in its affixes and priorities).
Now, especially at the beginning of the NMR era (50s and 60s) when 1H
NMR thrived by itself, not yet complemented by 13C NMR, the
hydrocarbon skeleton was primarily revealed by the spectrum.

Matter, when in a magnetic field and tickled
by RF
waves, gained in meaningfulness. NMR was a micro-scope of a different
order. It displayed inter-relationships between atoms in a molecule
(Barton 1972). Couplings among nuclei, whether scalar or dipolar
couplings, were the silk threads in the spider web that the NMR
spectrum revealed. NMR was truly the Ariadne’s thread guiding chemists
to their Holy Grail of structure elucidation.

The web of interactions thus revealed in turn
mapped molecular structure. Spectral analysis (the NMR tube) had
replaced chemical analysis (the test tube). Analyzing a spectrum,
furthermore, was an exact science, not an interpretation fraught with
uncertainty, open to skepticism and dispute.

How did chemists greet the new tool made
suddenly
available to them towards the mid-1950s? Their obvious alacrity was
tinged with ambivalence. Chemists of the old school did not always
embrace the new situation that they were dependent on young upstarts,
called ‘NMR specialists’. They retrained themselves. They had to. In
addition, they had to contend with the shadow cast by physics, which
obscured the cherished notion of the autonomy of chemistry, of its
non-reducibility to physics. The mixed feeling expressed itself in a
catch phrase of those times, ‘physical methods’.

With the advent of NMR, new values – in the
strongest sense of moral, ethical, and axiological values – came to
dominate chemistry, while more traditional values were made redundant
and obsolete (Campbell 1960). Take the example of elemental analyses.
Before NMR came on the scene, they were the equivalent of a moral
obligation. They linked laboratory notebooks to the final publication
of the results. Now, elemental analyses became dispensable by the
information from the new spectroscopies, high-resolution mass
spectrometry (Laidler 2004) even more so than NMR. In spite of this new
aspect of laboratory life, journals insisted for a long time (measured
not in years but in decades) on the continued insertion of elemental
analytical data in the experimental part of manuscripts submitted for
publication.

Such rearguard action denotes lingering
distrust of
the powerful new tools. It points to a kind of umbilical cord linking
chemists with their distant past. One can date the rise of the
elemental analysis, as the first step in establishing the structure of
an unknown, to Justus von Liebig’s devising of the Kaliapparat
in April 1830 (Usselman & Rocke 2005). For one-and-a-half century,
the elemental analysis had remained central to the activity of the
chemist. Quite suddenly, it was taken off its pedestal, to be discarded
on the junk heap of history.

NMR caused some unease in the profession for
other
reasons too. Early on, a chemist, whether inorganic, organic, or
physical, had to become self-taught in the rudiments and intricacies of
NMR. Given the pace of change in NMR methodologies, that made for some
insecurity. Add to this the uncertainty about the true nature of the
profession. Was being a chemist simply a matter of isolating a
compound, putting it in an NMR tube, and publishing the results?
Somehow, this seemed like cheating. Something was lacking. The NMR
revolution brought a challenge to one’s self-image as a chemist. The
profession was visibly changing. It was taking a turn, but was it for
the better?

There were many aspects of the interactions
between
chemistry and NMR. I have commented so far on the impact of this new
instrumentation upon the laboratory in its daily activity. One should
add that there were chemists who also contributed to the development of
NMR methodologies. Names which come to mind most forcefully are those
of Frank A. L. Anet, Axel A. Bothner-By (Bothner-By 1996), H.S.
Gutowsky (Gutowsky 1996), William D. Phillips, and John D. Roberts
(Roberts 1996).[9]

In its spectral patterns NMR embodied a
spectacular
proof of the underlying quantum physics, and of the uncanny accuracy of
its predictions of line frequencies and intensities. Thus, it brought
with it, if not an understanding, at least an acceptance of quantum
physics. Rank-and-file chemists thus became somewhat informed about the
key developments of physics in the 1930s. They became inadvertent
converts to quantum ideas.

Any revolution, political or scientific,
affects
the language. It comes with its own lexicon. NMR was no exception. It
gave chemists a lingua franca, an idiom that not only extended
the vocabulary, but also deepened their understanding of molecules, of
their electronic distribution for instance (Anon. 1962). Almost as an
aftereffect, such an improved understanding of the structure of
molecules vastly improved communication among the tribe. Chemists
became more conversant with one another, from being given a language
with improved performance.

Equally interesting is the profound effect
that NMR
had on chemical thinking. An outstanding case is that of Jean-Marie
Lehn. In the 1960s, Lehn oversaw NMR in his mentor’s, Guy Ourisson’s,
laboratory at the University of Strasbourg. Lehn thus started his
career as an NMR specialist. It gave him a lifelong attention to even
minute details in NMR spectra. Their deep chemical meaning for sure
would have escaped another chemist’s eye. Many of Lehn’s experiments
were designed either starting from such observations or with NMR in
mind as the main tool of study.[10]

was NMR a mere tool for chemists? It
fulfilled
several other roles in the tribal culture. It was a prestige item.
Status accrued to scientists who, somehow, had access to the latest,
most expensive, and state-of-the-art instrumentation. When a visitor
came to a laboratory, the tour did not fail to include a proud display
of one’s NMR spectrometer(s) – usually in the basement of the building,
given the weight of electromagnets, until superconducting magnets came
into general use during the 1970s and 1980s.

Showing off one’s NMR equipment (Huisgen
1994)[11]
was also done in scientific journals. Inclusion of an NMR spectrum or
several gave allure to one’s publications. A cursory look at chemistry
journals shows the start of such practice in the early 1960s, with a
steep rise to a maximum in the 1970s – 1D spectra making room for their
2D siblings (Ernst 1992) – followed by a slow, gradual wane. The cost
of the printed page saw to it. The picture shown was worth, literally,
a thousand words. Of course, as the Golden Sixties gave way to the
Stagnant Seventies (Smith & Karlesky 1977, Graham & Diamond
1997), expensive laboratory equipment became more difficult to procure;
but by that time it had become a vital necessity.

Besides a ‘keeping-up with the Joneses’
element,
publication of NMR spectra conformed to another, more of a long-term
trend (in the sense of braudélian longue durée):
displaying
one’s evidence, as if scientific journals had turned into courtrooms.
NMR spectra, in that respect, were showcase data. They brought forward
prime evidence.

In addition to those two roles, showing-off
and
confounding critics, published spectra were also iconic of the
excellence of the laboratory work behind the paper. They underlined how
neat and careful it had been. One would see at a glance not only the
quality of the spectrum with sharp, well-resolved, tell-tale lines, one
could also not help noticing the absence of impurities, or that
statements made in the text about the coexistence of different reaction
products were borne out by the data, and so forth.

Last but not least, NMR weighed hard on the
budget
of chemical laboratories. It gave chemistry, starting in the 1960s, a
new need for money, for big money. The small science, that of a lone
craftsman, was being displaced by another form of small science, no
longer that of the single investigator but that of the small research
group, a considerably more expensive endeavor.[12]
The NMR spectrometer had to be replaced every three to five years with
a new instrument (Roberts 1990). In order to stay competitive, one had
to somehow secure grant money for such hefty investments.

5. The 1960s: chromatographic takeover and other laboratory
changes

The chemistry laboratory changed more between
1950 and 2000 than from 1600 until 1950 (Prelog 1991, Streitwieser
1996). So much is undeniable. Even though chromatography dates back to
the turn of the twentieth century (Twsett 1906) – equally significantly
it was rediscovered in the 1930s by Richard Kuhn and edgar Lederer – it
underwent a blossoming during the second half of the twentieth century.
A.J.P. Martin and R.L.M. Synge devised paper chromatography (1943), due
to penury during World War II. Together with other chromatographic
methods, such as thin-layer, gas phase, and high-pressure liquid phase
chromatography, paper chromatography rose to the ascendancy in
laboratories during the 1950s and 1960s. These chromatographic methods
superseded earlier separation techniques, such as fractional
distillation, crystallization, sublimation, etc., because they
were considerably more powerful, could be automated, and required only
miniscule amounts of material for analytical purposes; in addition,
they could be redirected to preparative purposes.

Many of these chromatographic techniques
became
implemented in simple-to-operate instruments. In the 50s, they
benefited, just like NMR, from the huge progress in electronics brought
about by World War II; and later on, from the invention of the
transistor. These methods achieved a revolution in the separation and
isolation of chemicals from mixtures. The time required for this truly
preliminary stage in chemical research was rather suddenly cut-down
from weeks to hours. But, again just like NMR, such progress was
costly. It weighed on the budget of chemical laboratories.

The chemical laboratory was radically
transformed by the mid-1960s.[13]
In addition to NMR and chromatography, other molecular spectroscopies,
which were then implemented in commercial instruments, first and
foremost mass spectrometry, also invaded the chemical laboratory
(Morris 2002). The combination of chromatographic isolation and
structural determination using predominantly mass spectrometry, NMR,
and, to a smaller extent, infrared spectrometry, allowed chemists to
go, typically in a week and sometimes in a single day, from an unknown
chemical in a mixture to a structure on paper. During the same period
of the 1960s, routine use of X-ray diffractometry[14]
for molecular structure determination – the timescale was also the week
–, at the hands of a few pioneers such as R.B. Woodward started to
rival the joint use of mass spectrometry and NMR for the same purpose.

The 1960s were noteworthy too for the arrival
of
computation at the service of the chemical laboratory, whether
industrial or academic. At that time, mainframe computers, housed in a
computer center, were still the norm. It was only later, in the 1970s
and 1980s that personal computers started to displace them. The
introduction of the Macintosh by the Apple company was the analog for
computation of what the A-60 spectrometer had been for NMR: it enabled
hands-on operation by the individual graduate student. Developments of
software were even more important than the steady, Moore-Law abiding,
progress in hardware. Roald Hoffmann introduced his Extended
Hückel
theory in 1963, implemented in a molecular orbital program parametrized
for many elements in the Periodic Table. It allowed chemists to
calculate properties such as energies and geometries for many chemical
structures. Two years later, John Pople came out with another
semi-empirical tool for molecular orbital calculations (Mulliken 1972,
Ransil 1989), known by the acronym of CNDO. At the same time, the
Quantum Chemistry Program Exchange (QCPE) was set-up in 1963 at the
University of Indiana as a clearinghouse for software; many of the
programs could be acquired by chemists for a nominal fee. QCPE did much
for the dissemination of molecular orbital calculations as a new tool.
Another highly significant development, based on the computer too, was
retrosynthetic analysis, by which synthetic pathways to a target
molecule could be identified and compared (Corey 1992).

It would be an oversimplification to subsume
under
the heading of ‘Big Science’ (Weinberg 1967) the equipment of the
chemical laboratory during the 1950s and 1960s just because it included
relatively expensive instruments such as chromatographs and
spectrometers. One could make a case for the resilience of the notion
of ‘chemistry as craft’; supporting evidence would be, for instance,
the recourse to thin-layer, paper, or column chromatography in
complement with gas or high-pressure liquid chromatographies. The
former, low-tech tools required a measure of dexterity and care in
their use and turned out to be as important to the daily laboratory
life as the latter, high-tech methods. Accordingly, before the Golden
Sixties[15]
came to an end, chemists to some extent could see themselves with a
foot in each of the two worlds, that of traditional chemistry,
basically unchanged for two or three centuries, and that of modern
chemistry, with a plethora of new and powerful physical methods at
their fingertips.[16]

The tension between tradition and modernity
expressed itself not only in laboratory practice, but also in the
conceptualization of chemical entities, such as key intermediates in
chemical reactions. The 1960s saw the flare-up of the
‘classical-nonclassical ion’ controversy within physical organic
chemistry (Bartlett 1965, Weininger 2000). Its acme came in 1967 when
H.C. Brown published an article in Chemical and Engineering News,
presenting his orthodox views and criticizing the unorthodox,
non-classical proposal, first formulated by S. Winstein, using the
language of molecular-orbital theory.

The controversy failed to be resolved
decisively by
the end of the 1960s. However, it led to the demise of physical organic
chemistry,[17]
previously at the top of the totem pole in prestige (and in funding).
Synthetic organic chemists took advantage of the very public and
extremely acrimonious discussions to grab the lead in the pecking order
among sub-disciplines of organic chemistry, and, arguably, of chemistry
proper.[18]
Further factors were involved in synthetic organic chemistry’s rise to
the top: the exceptional personality and achievements of R.B. Woodward;
his influence in getting his students appointed to coveted faculty
positions; the economic pull of the pharmaceutical industry, its need
for well-trained preparative chemists to staff its laboratories; the
enduring notion of chemistry as a craft, which, in a defensible
description, was a silent protest against physics turning into factory
mode (Latour 1987, Galison 1997). Furthermore, with the narrowing of
the job market, synthetic organic chemistry reasserted itself
forcefully, at the expense of both physical and physical organic
chemistries.

Accordingly, to go back to the self-image of
chemists, one might say that the ‘classical-nonclassical ion’
controversy helped to firm up a dividing line between, roughly
speaking, two groups A and B. Group A was that of the traditionalists
and conservatives, led by synthetic organic chemists who draw their
power from the labor market, trained people for employment by the
pharmaceutical industry, and gave primacy to observation and experiment
opposed to theory and calculations (Boyd 1958). Group B was that of the
modernists, led by physical and quantum chemists to whom the
Schrödinger equation was the Rosetta Stone, who gave primacy to
deducing conclusions from first principles and to numerical
calculations, and who saw themselves as pioneers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the chemical
community was
bound together by a set of assumptions held so deeply that chemists
themselves were largely unconscious of them. The first of these shared
assumptions was linguistic: everyone spoke English. Turning to organic
and biological chemistry, as distinct from physical chemistry, another
assumption was a collective distaste for mathematics and any part of
chemical theory that called for a mathematical input. Yet another
assumption from the same rather reactionary quarters, in industry
especially, was the superiority of trial-and-error, Edisonian research
to any other approach. This cluster of assumptions affected the
behavior in many ways.

In spite of the split between organic and
physical
chemists, a group identity asserted itself that featured the same
ambivalent aspects of the culture as a whole. The combined strengths of
organic and physical chemists would enable them to explore,
appropriate, rule over, and (in some cases) settle vast territories
beyond the horizon.

The victory of the As over the Bs, at the end
of
the 1960s, was consolidated by the polywater debacle, a story to be
alluded to later, in conjunction with some other episodes of
lemmings-like collective behavior.

6. The 1970s: acquiring environmental consciousness

I have referred to the Minimata mercury
intoxication already. Other accidents, due to chemical spills from
industrial production, struck closer to the homes of European and
American chemists (Taube 1983). A book published right at the beginning
of the decade heralded the new environmental concerns (Benarde 1970).
Chronic pollution of the Rhine led countries responsible for the
effluents (France and Germany) and countries suffering from the toxic
wastes (The Netherlands) to sign a treaty in 1976. In principle, it
guaranteed a return to a healthier state of the water. But that did not
prevent industrial plants close to the Rhine from continuing, or
resuming to use, the river as a sewer. A disaster occurred during the
following decade, in 1986: a major dump in the Basel area of 30 tons of
fungicide and mercury wastes killed 500,000 fish. The U.S. saw a number
of similar episodes. For instance, Union Carbide was sentenced in 1981
for having dumped nearly 100 cubic meters of carcinogenic chemicals in
a river in Virginia, the Kanhawa.

In 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina
published their conclusion of an extremely careful study of atmospheric
chemistry: chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals used in a number of
applications (e.g., as refrigeration fluids and propellants in
spray cans), when bombarded by solar UV-rays in the upper atmosphere,
released chlorine atoms, which in turn destroyed ozone molecules to the
tune of 10,000 per chlorine atom.[19]
These authors drew attention to the threat to life on the planet from
the destruction of the protective ozone layer (Rowland 1995, 1997).

At first, and for more than a decade, the
response
from the chemical industry was belligerent and obscurantist. They tried
to impugn the credibility of those scientists. There seems to be a
deplorable pattern in the attempts from the chemical industry to
smother criticism with personal attacks and the setting of artificial
controversies, with its salaried scientists toeing the party line.
Similarly disgraceful treatments were meted out to F. Sherwood Rowland
as had been to Rachel Carson many years before.[20]

James Farman’s report of the ozone hole over
Antarctica in 1981 was the turning point. The major producers of CFCs
(companies such as Dow and DuPont de Nemours), a $ 9 billion
business
with annual growth rates of 10% (Thomas 2000) then espoused the
worldwide concern. That would finally result in the Montreal Protocol
in 1987, banning CFCs, stopping their production, and promoting
substitution by HCFCs.

In 1976, the Seveso accident appeared on the
front
pages of newspapers worldwide: 2 kg of
2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin had been dispersed by a Givaudan
plant in the neighborhood. This industrial spill, which did not cause
any human casualties (cattle grazing on nearby meadows were killed in
large numbers as a safety precaution) nor had any long-term effects on
human health, nevertheless raised the level of consciousness about
dioxins and their release by papermaking mills and municipal waste
incinerators, among other sources. As a consequence, careful controls
were instituted in industrial countries, leading within a couple of
decades to at least halving the amount of dioxins discharged in the
environment in France, for instance.

The chemical community was the butt of
unrelenting criticism from the public and the media,[21]
who regarded it the chief culprit of environmental pollution, in the
form of acid rain (Cowling 1982, Mohnen 1988, Baedecker & Reddy
1993) and harmful chemicals in surface water (Baker et al.
1991) such as the Great Lakes (Hilleman 1988), in tainting supplies of
drinking water (Ross & Amter 2002), and in irresponsibly and
illegally dumping toxic wastes (Love Canal near Niagara Falls, NY;[22]
the Hudson River was continuously polluted by PCBs).[23]

The chemical community responded, as a rule,
rather
promptly – over less than two decades – and responsibly. The chemical
industry cleaned up its operation, as a rule allowing only innocuous
effluents from its plants. Environmental research was funded
handsomely, and drew significant numbers of chemists. Chemical
education also followed suit, for instance the American Chemical
Society sponsored textbooks of general chemistry for non-chemistry
undergraduate majors, focused on environmental issues.[24]

A yet more interesting trend developed. I
contend
that the new environmental consciousness among chemists, with lasting
value (Mossman et al 1990) led them to move in the direction of
biology (Bensaude-Vincent 2002), rather than continue with traditional
mainstream chemical science.[25]
This ‘Biological Turn’ was marked by the vitamin B12 synthesis
(Woodward 1973), the much admired biomimetic steroid syntheses (Johnson
1977, 1998), the synthesis of natural products (Woodward 1972,
Nakanishi 1991) such as giberellic acid (Corey 1978) or multifidene
(Boland & Jaenicke 1979), the considerable research effort by E.J.
Corey in the field of prostaglandins, the pioneering studies by Martin
Karplus on protein molecular dynamics (1977), and so on (Todd 1983,
Williams 1990). Quite a few small start-up companies banked on the
public taste for natural products, for instance, in the form of herbal
over-the-counter drugs (Anon. 1999).

The 1970s had opened with the first oil
crisis.
This geopolitical event made political leaders seek alternative energy
sources. The chemical profession followed the money. Since grants were
awarded for work on alternative energy sources and environmental
issues, chemists started work in such areas. They became
environmentally conscious (Baird 1995) and started cleaning-up their
operation, whether in industrial plants or in academic laboratories.
Everybody became safety-conscious, and pollution of the environment
became drastically curtailed (Ember 1991, Rodrick 1992, McGinn 2000).

7. The 1980s: mystique of growth

I will now, in some detail, document my
assertion of the intoxication by growth for its own sake, basing myself
on the Pimentel Report (PR), first published in 1985 by the American
Chemical Society (Pimentel & Coonrod 1987).

An illustration in PR shows, as a small icon
of
spectroscopic progress, the improvement in sensitivity of nuclear
magnetic resonance spectrometry. In only 15 years, the solid-state 13C
spectrum of adamantane, with only two types of carbons, CH and CH2,
had turned from inaccessibility to an easy routine. Such solid-state 13C
spectra became important diagnostic tools for the chemical industry in
the areas of polymers, whether as elastomers, textile fibers, or
plastics such as polypropylene.

However, if NMR spectrometers improved
considerably
in performance, their cost increased likewise. A graph in the Pimentel
Report depicts these twin trends: the increase of NMR spectrometers in
magnetic field strength, thereby in resolution, in sensitivity, and in
cost. Chemists in the 1980s were clamoring for increased public support
from granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the
National Institutes of Health, and battling with one another for grants
from those agencies. Instrumentation was costly across the board, a
cost-quality diagram in PR made the same point for mass spectrometry.
Half-a-million dollars was the price of a state-of-the-art mass
spectrometer in the mid-80s. The implicit message was ‘give us the
funding necessary to study biopolymers such as proteins, we are
willing, we only need the money’.

Both academic and industrial chemists became
increasingly dependent on computers. The PR includes another
exponential plot, showing that American industry had equipped itself
with large mainframe computers during the post-World War II period. A
complementary graph conveys the steadily increasing cost of computation.

In the 1980s, chemists set up materials
science as
an offshoot of their discipline. They strove for polymers to replace
wood, glass, and metals in many of their uses, and to open-up brand new
applications. Plastics underwent an exponential growth during the
post-World War II period, which the PR depicted graphically. And
chemists took pride in the petrochemical industry rivaling metallurgy
in output. One of the illustrations in the PR aimed at informing the
public that sales of chemicals were comparable in volume with those of
motor vehicles or machinery. The curve goes through a maximum,
reflecting the downturn caused by the second global oil crisis of
1979-1980 with the attendant worldwide recession.

The PR prided itself, not only on the
production of
man-made fibers and plastics, but also on the sheer number of new
chemical compounds. It showed their growth, as registered by Chemical
Abstracts
during the second half of the twentieth century, in a picture of
self-satisfaction and hubris. Chemists prided themselves on the
proliferation of chemicals and the increased density of the
chemosphere.[26]

This was the time also of the uncontrolled
proliferation of organometallics. In countries with powerful chemical
organizations, but lacking a share in the leadership then exercised by
American chemists in concepts and methods, primarily in the United
Kingdom, Italy, and France, the field of organometallics became the
province of unimaginative scientists who would prepare compounds, based
on analogies from the Periodic Table, only because such compounds were
heretofore unknown. They assimilated newness and innovation.

Chemists in the 1980s enjoyed their
self-image as,
not only good citizens who had cleaned-up their operation during the
previous decade, but as human benefactors (Woodburn 1976) through their
crucial contribution to pharmaceutical research. The message of the PR
is loud and clear: since chemists are helping humankind by devising
new, efficient drugs against disease, if they are to continue doing so
successfully, they need more money for equipment.

That brought up the battle for funding with
the
rival discipline, physics. Physicists in the 80s were better than
chemists at grantsmanship and public relations and were henceforth more
successful in getting mammoth collective projects financed. Chemists,
conversely and as illustrated in the PR, prided themselves on
demographics, on beating physicists in sheer number of jobs – or better
yet in the production of Ph.D. scientists.[27]

Chemical science was moving at such a furious
pace
in the 80s that the scientists were unable to keep up with the
information they were generating. Fullerenes are an outstanding example
of such an information overload. Richard Smalley made a point in his
Nobel Lecture by referring to pioneering work by a number of scientists
in several countries of which he, Kroto, and Curl were unaware at the
time of their discovery of C60 (Smalley 2003).

8. The 1990s: attempts at rebranding

The 1990s were the period of rather massive
retirement of the post World War II baby boomers from their positions
in academia and industry. How would this generation change impact
chemistry? Would there be a takeover by Generation X? Would it bring in
an entirely new set of human and professional values? The perhaps
surprising answer is that continuity stifled mutation.

I base this assessment on a study I made of
young
faculty members in American chemistry departments, and of their stated
research goals, using the standard source for such information (ACS
1995). I picked at random the letter G. These then were my findings.

Faculty members born after 1955 – my
arbitrarily
chosen cutoff date – numbered 44; only five were women. By far, the
dominant research area was biochemistry and molecular biology – even
though the names were selected from the chemistry section of the
directory that excluded departments of biochemistry. Ten of the junior
faculty members were engaged in such bio-work. Half-a-dozen other
areas, more or less equally populated, accounted for most of the
remainder of this sample: organometallics (6), organic synthesis (5),
surfaces (5), NMR (4), spectroscopy other than NMR (4), and catalysis
(3). To my surprise, traditional topics going back to the 1960s
continued to be popular with some of these budding academics.
Stereochemistry and conformational analysis was one of them.

Indeed these young faculty members, the vast
majority of which were still assistant professors, were playing a safe
game. They obviously picked areas of work that were both funded more
easily and promised to provide publishable results in short time. I
failed to identify highly adventuresome profiles. To the contrary,
quite a few among those individuals posted a number of different
research orientations: ‘something will have to work out’, seemed to be
the guiding motive. One of these young investigators for instance – he
was quite representative in such an across-the-board sweep – announced
he was working on "organic and polymer self-assembly; electronically
conductive polymers; liquid crystals; self-assembled monolayers;
host-guest interactions; organic electrochemistry."

The background for such a behavior – and the
US
were representative of an almost worldwide trend – was an erosion in
public support of chemical science. To give a simple figure, between
the 1960s and 1990s, there was a ca. 60% drop in funded research
proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation and the National
Institutes of Health. From 1983 to 2002, funding of chemistry and
physics by the US Departments of Energy and Defense, had plummeted.
Correspondingly, there were 9% fewer graduate students in chemistry in
the US in 2000 than in 1993 (Eiseman et al 2002).

In response to the wane of public support for
chemistry, some chemists became more vocal. They praised not only the
field and their individual contributions with a more emphatic tone.
Hyperbole as a rhetorical tool was resorted to more often. It marked
scientific publications especially, research proposals even more.
Advertising hype displaced the more modest, objective, and neutral
style of reporting. Results became routinely ‘divulged’ or ‘revealed’.
Facts were praised by the authors as ‘unprecedented’, ‘novel’, and
‘remarkable’, to quote some of the routine adjectives.

Such advertising belonged to a relatively new
trend. Science, in addition to being conducted according to the norms,
had to be marketed adequately. Science results were sometimes
publicized as if they were a commercial commodity. Hence, one witnessed
attempts at renaming and rebranding chemistry, in part or as a whole.

Renaming as a whole? The Department of
Chemistry at
Harvard took the lead. It added to its name the complement ‘Chemical
Biology’. Other universities (Cornell) followed suit. They had a good
excuse in improving their name and their image, so they thought: their
new name was more accurate. As mentioned above, the younger faculty
members were moving towards more biological topics.

Against the profit background (Hounshell
1998) and
in the face of decreasing public support of science, the research
university sought to reinvent itself (Kumar & Patel 1995). With
academic and industrial sciences continuing to be structured in
different ways (Ziman 1994), both the chemical industry and the
pharmaceutical industry supported two of the vogues[28]
which were foremost in the conceptual landscape of the 1990s, those of
biotechnologies – both within small start-up companies and within large
corporations such as Novartis in Basel[29]
– and of nanoscience and technology (Welch Foundation 1996, National
Science Board 2002, Schummer 2004, 2005).

Even within academia, chemists were shifting
their
focus (Ivory Tower, intellectual distinction, remoteness from public
concerns) to the marketing of their productions. Those products
continued to take the form of publications and patents. The novelty was
the hype, often combined with the perceived need to disassociate
oneself from the negative image carried by the discipline.

A solution was to rename the subdiscipline
one
belonged to. The new name would avoid the ‘chemical’ adjective. Surface
science thus thrived during the 90s. Another renaming occurred with the
nanoscience and nanotechnology bandwagon.[30]

That brings up the twin issues of branding
and
rebranding (Rivkin & Sutherland 2004). Were you living off your
heritage as a traditional chemist, without paying attention to negative
public opinion, without thinking about the future at all? Such a stance
was risky at a time when, to mention just one country, the government
was closing down chemistry departments in British universities.[31]
It was much more advisable either to brand yourself as trading on your
heritage, but with the future in mind – which accounted for
combinatorial chemistry.[32]
Better yet, you could establish your business as a brand-new endeavor,
with the future predominant on your horizon (Schultz 2000).

Green Chemistry was such a ploy. It was a
renaming
and rebranding of industrial chemistry, terming research in
environmentally-friendly processes: under mild conditions of pressure
and temperature, dispensing with organic solvents, releasing innocuous
wastes only, if at all.[33,
34]

The Internet was influential in such attempts
at
rebranding parts of chemistry, to the benefit of individual scientists.
Those were able to build an allegiance with their constituency through
the Web, to set-up networks too, in a much shorter time than within the
traditional pre-existing brands – analytical or physical chemistry, say
– and became more relevant to perceived needs in doing so (Schultz
2000).

The Internet made networking easier (Bachrach
1996), so much is incontrovertible. However, would it facilitate
regrouping the chemical community, its various segments each into its
mainstream? Or conversely, would it make it easier to splinter into
finer and finer subdisciplines, as a symptom of disciplinary maturity?
Both of these trends, the centripetal and the centrifugal, can be
discerned.[35]

The former, the rush into conformity,[36]
explains the continued pull of various fads, the appearance of
ephemeral vogues that would enlist support from chemists. This was
neither new nor original to chemistry. Chemists had earlier on been
swept into brief stampedes, such as the polywater 1972 episode (Franks
1981) or the cold fusion 1989 foray into pathological science (Langmuir
& Hall 1989), Gold Rushes and inflationary bubbles both ending with
a quick crash.

That the 1990s were not immune from such
collective
and highly cooperative phenomena was a sign of the maturing of the
discipline. This permeated the collective consciousness of chemists.
The perceived needs for renaming and rebranding came against such a
background of a mature, well-established science.

Some topics for scientific research at times become very popular, to such an extent that a chemometric description as an epidemic may become relevant (Franks 1981). During the 90s, within synthetic organic chemistry, the devising of pathways to target molecules such as taxol or brevicomin was highly fashionable (Lowe 2004). Petrochemistry had its own vogues too. One of those was triggered in the 1990s by the devising of efficient catalysts for the olefin metathesis reaction: "a few years ago, it seemed that everyone with two alkenes in their lab was finding a way to get them in the same flask with some Grubbs catalyst" (Lowe 2004). The Nobel Prize in chemistry occasionally puts the ultimate seal of approval on such popularity polls. The metathesis reaction was thus distinguished in 2005.

9. Conclusions

Chemists have to face chemophobia. Such
public hostility is rooted in a multiplicity of factors. Some are
mythical, such as the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah from the befouling of air for breathing and of water for
drinking, or the twin medieval anguishes over the cognate poisoning of
wells or polluting of the air. Some are very real, such as chemical
warfare or Bhopal.

Hence, a significant segment of the
population sees
the chemists as if in a ghetto. Such scapegoating of the chemical
community – a scapegoating indeed, chemists bear the brunt of
complaints against environmental pollution, of which other industries
and the public itself (automobiles) are largely responsible – was met
with stoical equanimity[37]
during the 1950-2000 period. It made for a remarkably close-knit,
worldwide community, united through its use of a common language, that
of structural formulas (Cram 1990).

Outer pressure from criticism did not only
make
chemists close ranks, it also sharpened their self-image as providers
of material benefits to society. For the whole period (1939-1980s)
during which DuPont advertised its motto "Better Things for Better
Living … Through Chemistry", chemists identified readily with this
slogan and regretted its passing. They saw themselves as a social
group, honest (Roussel 1959a) and well-meaning, doing essential work,
and unjustly attacked, not recognized properly.

The worldwide chemical community has
countered
otherwise potentially disruptive tensions in embracing rapid change (in
laboratory tools, in the attendant training of young chemists [National
Research Council 2003, 2004] in topics of interest, etc.),
while upholding traditional values of craftsmanship and small science.
The truly remarkable adaptability, in the face of enormous changes
(Havinga 1991),[38,
39]
arguably stems from chemistry being the science of material
transformations, and from chemists thus being trained in both
monitoring and controlling change.

Moreover, chemists see themselves as creative
(Pacifico 1958, McGrayne 2001). To quote an eminent member of the
profession (Gortler 1999):

There’s always going to be chemistry, because
we are
so special, because we create new things. There’s almost no other
science that creates anything. We create new things, and that creation
involves an intellectual creativity in realizing what to do, what to
make, and why to make it, and what to do with it when you’ve got it,
that is very special to our field.

This notion of the creativity of chemists not
only
fits the ‘individualism methodology’ (Boudon 1979), it also ties in
nicely with a metaphor favored by chemists in recent years, that of
‘Chemistry, the Central Science’ (Breslow 1997, Brown et al
2003).

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented (in a highly
simplified form, truncated to the section on the 1980s) at the ‘Public
Images of Chemistry in the Twentieth Century’ conference held in Paris,
September 17-18, 2004. I gratefully acknowledge material support from
the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, and Fondation des
Treilles, Tourtour, which gave me the opportunity of two one-week stays
in February and in November 2005 to gather documentation in its Othmer
Library, and of a two-week stay in May 2005 for the write-up
respectively. In addition, I thank Roald Hoffmann for a most
enlightening, synthetic, and incisive presentation of the underlying
issues, during a discussion we had in Ithaca on February 3, 2005.

Notes

[1] The
periodization I
suggest is of course debatable. For instance, it has been proposed to
decompose the activity in chemical science during the last 25 years
along the categories of determination of protein structures; genetic
engineering’s debut; molecular mass production (combinatorial
chemistry); microscopes, polymers, and lasers; light, sound, and
atmosphere (sonochemistry & atmospheric chemistry); buckyballs and
beyond (Gwynne 2001).

[2] The
culmination of which came
about later with the synthesis of palytoxin in 1989 by Y. Kishi’s team
at Harvard, a monument to the Promethean ability of chemists.

[3] Only negative
evidence can be
adduced in support of this assertion. For instance, the series of
autobiographies that Jeffrey Seeman edited for the American Chemical
Society does not include, to my recollection, evidence of such concern
on the part of the academic leaders of the profession who were authors.

[4] The field
started being
populated substantially only after the discovery of ferrocene (Laszlo
& Hoffmann 2000, Rich 2004).

[9] Roberts was
made a convert in part by a scientist at DuPont (Ferguson 1996).

[10] A
representative example is one of his numerous studies in supramolecular
catalysis (Hosseini et al. 1987).

[11] The
evolution was
lightning-swift, with superconducting magnets superseding
electromagnets (McLauchlan 1996) and with the advent of Fourier
transform NMR, which ushered in multidimensional NMR.

[12] The simple
running costs for
daily operation of a chemical laboratory also escalated. This is easily
seen on the example of fluids. Prior to the 1950s, water and gas for
Bunsen burners were the only ones routinely provided. After the 1960s,
supplies that became standard included: compressed air; tanks of
helium, argon, nitrogen; liquid nitrogen; special oils for thermostatic
baths or vacuum pumps; etc.

[13] A
development that swept
through the whole of chemistry like wildfire. It was not confined to,
say, organic chemistry. There is a contemporary testimony of the impact
on inorganic chemistry (Lewis & Nyholm 1961).

[14] By tackling
large biological
molecules, pioneers from the British School initiated by J.D. Bernal
paved the way for such ultimately routine use (Hodgkin 1972).

[15] A
representative example is that of the University of North Carolina, in
Chapel Hill (Bursey & Crockford 1982).

[16] Physical
organic chemistry,
as a sub-discipline, embodied such a duality. In the hands of leaders
such as J.D. Roberts or J.A. Berson, it synthesized the molecules it
needed for physical measurements. A contemporary survey of the
mechanistic role of the physical organic philosophy is available (Hine
1960).

[17] The
recollections of J.A.
Berson, a leader of the field, make very interesting reading for his
historical consciousness (Gortler 2001).

[18] Many people
thought the
non-classical ion controversy was the modern equivalent of the medieval
argument about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. In
addition, physical organic chemistry was to some degree a victim of its
own success. By the late 1960s mechanistic thinking was everywhere, and
physical organic chemists who wanted to be on the cutting edge (and get
funding) went into bioorganic chemistry, enzymatic biochemistry, and
even molecular biology. So hordes of people were using and even
contributing to physical organic chemistry but not calling themselves
physical organic chemists (Weininger 2005).

[19] The devising
of highly
sensitive detection of CFCs by Lovelock was an important part of the
story (Dronsfield & Morris 2002).

[20] To be fair,
the position from industry was sometimes stated in a temperate manner
(Anon. 1962).

[21] Such
hostility to chemistry from the public can be dated back to the
publication of Rachel Carson’s masterpiece, Silent Spring,
in 1964. This book drew the public attention to the inconsiderate use
of pesticides such as DDT by farmers, with dramatic effects on the
ecology and on animal species accumulating the toxic chemical in their
tissues (Baker & Wilkinson 1990).

[22] Hooker
Chemical and Plastics
Corporation dumped an estimated 350 million lbs of hazardous chemical
wastes in this trench between 1942 and 1953. After it was filled and
covered, it was sold to the Niagara Falls Board of Education. The
scandal broke in 1977, after the New York Department of Environmental
Conservation reported the extent of soil and groundwater contamination
(Levine 1982).

[23] Unsurprisingly,
public
support of chemical research went down. In the US, federal funding
decreased by 14 percent in constant 1972 dollars between 1971 and 1975
(Smith & Karlesky 1977, pp. 86-101).

[25] Synthetic
organic chemists were thus updating their concerns, turning away from
their more traditional pursuit.

[26] A valuable
chemometric study on the proliferation of new chemicals is available
(Schummer 1997).

[27] The
statement has to be
balanced with the disaffection of undergraduate students with the
sciences, for chemistry in particular, starting in the 70s (Neckers
1979).

[28] Industrial
research is not
immune to fashions that, as a rule, hit at the academic-industrial
interface. The pharmaceutical industry, in its search for blockbuster
drugs, has tried a whole litany of means, among which one may recall
Hantzsch partition coefficients, linear free energy relationships, MO
calculations of electronic distribution in molecules, docking into
receptor sites using computer modeling, etc. The chemical
industry proper has had its own vogues, which influenced also some
academic research. For instance, shape-selective catalysis, as
performed by zeolites, led to a major undertaking in the area of
pillared clays, whose results little matched the expectations.

[29] Other
pharmaceutical companies, in Germany in particular (Boehringer, BASF,
Hoechst, etc.)
chose another option, subcontracting to specialized companies, in the
U.S. predominantly. By and large, this choice was an economic failure.

[30] The move was
protracted, as
so often in history. The incentive came from the discovery of the DNA
double-helix by Watson and Crick, and from the ensuing lecture by
Richard P. Feynman in 1959, calling for the devising of small
mechanical engines and devices operating at the nanometer scale.

[31] 18 British
universities
closed their departments of chemistry between 1992 and 2001, an overall
27% reduction. The trend did not stop with the decade though. By 2004,
28 departments of chemistry had been closed since 1996. Some pessimists
predicted that only six departments of chemistry might survive in the
UK.

[32] A name with
an obvious
redundancy, most of chemistry being combinatorial by nature. This vogue
was long overdue, Merrifield had pioneered his peptide synthesis on
small beads of polymers in the 1960s (Merrifield 1963), meeting
collective indifference from the profession. When such a technique was
rediscovered towards the end of the century, it came back with a big
splash with, behind it, big financial support from both materials
science and the pharmaceutical industry. The latter was intent, as it
always is, upon finding shortcuts to promising lead molecules, in terms
of drugs both patentable and profitable.

[33] James Clark
at the
University of York was one of its leading advocates. Professor Clark is
Head of the York Green Chemistry Group, Scientific Editor of the Green
Chemistry Journal, Director of the Green Chemistry Network, Joint
Co-ordinator of the Green Chemistry Research Network, and Series Editor
of the RSC Clean Technology Monographs.

[34] The New
Yorker published
on July 5, 2004, p. 84, a cartoon by artist Mick Stevens. It depicts
the headquarters of a chemical company. While the chimneystacks are
spewing-out dark, presumably noxious smoke, the corporation advertises
its efforts at controlling its own image. The cartoon illustrates how
comically self-defeating such an attempt appears to the lay public. As
illustrated in this cartoon, the efforts by the chemical industry to
redeem itself in the public eye were doomed. There was a backlash in
public opinion against the new image promoted by the chemical industry.
The very fact that, at the same time, high-profit pharmaceutical
branches divorced from their low-profit, cyclical chemical siblings,
made even more unbelievable the claims by the chemical industry that it
was safe and clean – even though such claims were the truth. To
eradicate a prejudice ain’t easy!

[35] It was the
Age of
Globalization too, which greatly affected, in particular, recruitment
of graduate students and postdocs in American universities (Tobias et
al. 1995, COSEPUP 2000, Walker et al. 2004).

[36] Michael J.
S. Dewar has been not only lucid, delightfully sarcastic too, about
this unfortunate tendency (Dewar 1992).

[37] Which
outside observers often mistakenly equate with arrogance.

[38] Consider for
instance the
manufacture of polymers. Each of the various grades of polyethylene was
made using different processes and catalysts during each of the decades
under study. Recollections of one of the pioneers make for useful
reading (Ziegler 1972).

[39] The visual
idiom changed
considerably. In the 50s, it was dominated by the octant rule,
valence-bond structures, cage molecules, IR and UV-visible
spectroscopies. In the 60s, proton NMR, mass spectrometry, linear free
energy relationships, and the valence shell electron pair repulsion
(Gillespie-Nyholm) came to the fore. The 70s saw the rise of carbon-13
NMR, molecular orbital diagrams, and coordination geometries. In the
80s, zeolite structures, 2D NMR, computer simulations of protein
structures with inclusion of molecular dynamics became iconic. The 90s
saw new kinds of images with AFM and STM becoming popularized, with
entities pictured such as nanotubes.

Hounshell, D.A.: 1998, ‘Measuring the Return
on
Investment in R&D: Voices from the Past, Visions of the Future’,
in: National Research Council (eds.), Assessing the Value of
Research in the Chemical Sciences, National Academy Press,
Washington, DC, pp. 6-17.

National Research Council: 1998, Assessing
the Value of Research in the Chemical Sciences. Report of a Workshop,
National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

National Research Council: 2003, Reducing
the
Time from Basic Research to Innovation in the Chemical Sciences. A
Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable, National
Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Ransil, B.J.: 1989, Life of a scientist:
an
autobiographical account of the development of molecular orbital theory
with an introductory memoir by Friedrich Hund / Robert S. Mulliken,
Springer, Berlin.